The Last Tsar

by Edvard Radzinsky

  When Olga was quite tiny, the older girls teased her: “What kind of grand duchess are you if you can’t even reach the table?”

  “I don’t know myself,” Olga answered with a sigh, “but you ask Papa, he knows everything.” “He knows everything”—that was how Alix raised them.

  Wearing white dresses and colored sashes, they descend noisily to the empress’s lilac (Alix’s favorite color) study: there was a huge rug, so cozy to crawl over, and on the rug a huge box of toys, which were passed down from older to younger.

  They were growing up.

  “Olga has turned 9—quite the big girl.”

  Olga and Tatiana—these names frequently appear together in their diaries and, later, when Nicholas went to Headquarters, in his correspondence with Alix. Here they are quite little: “Olga and Tatiana rode their bicycles side by side” (Nicholas’s diary).

  “Olga & Tatiana returned only at about 2.” “Now O. & T. are at Olga’s Committee” (from letters of the tsaritsa).

  And so on.

  Olga was a snub-nosed blonde, enchanting and impetuous. Tatiana was more focused, less spontaneous, and less talented, but she made up for this lack with her equanimity. Tatiana was like her mother. The gray-eyed beauty was the conduit of all her mother’s decisions. The sisters called her “the Governor.”

  And the two younger girls, so tenderly devoted to one another, both merry, a little plump—broad in the bone, like their grandfather: Marie, a Russian beauty, and good-hearted Anastasia. For her constant readiness to serve everyone they called Anastasia “our good, fat Tutu.” They also called her schwibzik—little one.

  They did not like to study very much (this is evident from the many mistakes in their diaries). The sharpest was Olga, who did have an aptitude for learning.

  “Ah, I understand: the helping verbs are the servant of the verbs. Only one unlucky verb, ‘to have,’ must serve itself,” she told her teacher Gilliard.

  The sentence of a girl surrounded by servants from the cradle.

  They slept in large children’s beds and on cots, practically without pillows, two to a room.

  They would take those cots with them into exile, all the way to Ekaterinburg; they would sleep on them that very last night. Then their murderers would spend the night on those beds.

  Like the whole family, they kept diaries. Subsequently in Tobolsk, when the commissar came from Moscow, they would burn those diaries. Only a few notebooks would remain.

  I am looking through the diaries of Marie and Tatiana, in the traditional scrapbooks, with gold bindings and a moiré lining (their father had started his diary as a boy in just such books). Marie’s faceless enumeration of events: “This morning church, supper in the evening with Papa and Alexei, in the afternoon tea with Ania.”

  Tatiana kept exactly the same kind of diary.

  Again in Olga’s diary (in a plain black notebook; she wanted to be like her father even in this): “We had tea.… We played tiddlywinks.” And so on. But one thing is surprising: it is always “we” in the diaries. They were together so much that they even thought of themselves collectively.

  An enchanting detail: dried flowers remained in the girls’ diaries. Flowers from the park at Tsarskoe Selo, where they had been so happy. They took them along into exile and preserved them between the pages of their notebooks. After burning nearly all their diaries, they put the flowers in the remaining notebooks. Souvenirs of a destroyed life.

  I turn the pages cautiously. If only they don’t crumble into dust, these flowers, dried once upon a time by little girls in the last carefree summer of their life.

  There is a photograph in the empress’s album.

  She is lying on a couch, her head flung back, her disturbing, tragic profile. Around her on little benches sit her daughters and on a pillow on the floor—Alexei. The girls are gazing at him with adoring smiles. The delicate oval of his face, the light chestnut, curling hair with a streak of bronze, and his mother’s gray eyes—the little prince. The chronically ill prince.

  “Give me a bicycle,” he asks his mother.

  “You know you cannot.”

  “I want to play tennis like my sisters.”

  “You know you dare not play.”

  And then, breaking their hearts, he cries, repeating: “Why aren’t I like everyone else?”

  The girls witnessed and helped their mother during his endless suffering. During the war they, like their mother, would be good nurses.

  Pages from their life. Brilliant balls, the noisy life of society—how little of all this there was in the life of these first young ladies of Russia.

  But then, one summer….

  Aboard the imperial yacht Standart, they approached a pier in Crimea. Dressed in enormous white hats and long white dresses they were seated in open carriages, which set out in a brilliant string.

  Alix’s dream had come true: on the site of the unhappy palace where Alexander III had died, where Nicholas himself had nearly died, they had erected a miracle. A white Italianate palace to replace the old wooden one; the sea stretched out from the rooms. They would remember this paradise in their Siberian imprisonment, in their freezing house.

  At Livadia they took many photographs of each other: here is Alexei and next to him his favorite spaniel, Joy.

  They all had their favorite dogs. Anastasia had a tiny King Charles, which a wounded officer had given the sisters in the hospital. It could be carried in a muff.

  Mikhail Medvedev, the son of a guard who took part in the family’s execution, told this story: “My father used to tell us—when they loaded the corpses onto the truck, he was in charge of the loading—the corpse of a tiny dog fell out of the sleeve of the outfit of one of the grand duchesses.”

  Here, in Livadia, Olga turned sixteen. She was appointed colonel-in-chief of the Hussar Regiment. In the evening there was a ball. An orchestra of military trumpeters played. Blond, wearing a long pink dress, she stood in the middle of the hall, and all the Hussar officers at the ball were in love with her.

  That evening she put on her diamond jewelry for the first time.

  Every birthday, the thrifty Alix gave her daughters one pearl and one diamond. So that when they were sixteen they could have two pieces of jewelry made.

  ——

  The family spent the winter at Tsarskoe Selo, in their beloved old Alexander Palace. Everything followed Alix’s regular routine.

  At two o’clock she emerged from the room with the children: an outing in the carriage. She did not like to walk; she had weak legs. She drove to some distant church where no one knew her and there prayed earnestly, kneeling on the stone slabs. At eight o’clock, dinner. Nicholas came out as well. Alix appeared in an open dress with diamonds. At nine they went upstairs to the nursery and prayed with Alexei, and then Nicholas went to his study to write in his diary. In the evening, the traditional reading aloud.

  In the golden cage where the family lived, nothing had changed for centuries. Anya described it: the furniture in the palace smelt of the same perfume as it had under her great-great-grandmother Catherine the Great, and there was the same gilt furniture, and the same footmen in feathered caps.

  The Alexander Palace floats out of nothingness. Now we see it through the eyes of the French ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paléologue:

  “The Alexander Palace appears before me in its most ordinary aspect,… my suite includes a footman … wearing a little cap decorated with red, black, and yellow feathers. They lead me through the formal drawing rooms, through the empress’s drawing room, down a long corridor onto which open the rooms of the sovereign. There I encounter a lackey wearing a very simple livery and bearing a tea tray. Further on a small internal staircase opens up leading to the rooms of the most august children: the parlormaid runs up it to the next floor.”

  This parlormaid running to the upper floor may have been Elizaveta Ersberg.

  THE PARLORMAID ELIZAVETA ERSBERG

  One day I received a letter.

/>   “Writing to you is Maria Nikolaevna Ersberg.”

  I confess, I shuddered. That was the last name of the imperial family’s parlormaid who shared their exile.

  “My grandfather Nikolai Ersberg was the palace stoker under Alexander III. He stoked the furnaces in Anichkov and Gatchina palaces, as well as the Winter Palace. He suffered a blow in the wreck of the imperial train near Borki and died in 1889. His daughter, my fathers younger sister, Elizaveta Nikolaevna Ersherg (born September 18, 1882, died in the blockade, March 12, 1942), graduated from the Patriotic Grammar School and was chosen by Nicholas’ mother Maria Feodorovna for a parlormaid. She served with faith and truth from 1898 until May 1918.… When the family was forced into exile in 1917, the tsaritsa gathered together all the servants and announced that she would be pleased if any of them wanted to serve them in exile as well. Inasmuch as the situation was altogether uncertain, however, she could promise no salary. Elizaveta, moved by a sense of duty and by her devotion to the girls, decided to go. In the blueprint of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, all the quarters are marked as to whom they belonged to. On it there is the room of my Aunt Elizaveta.

  “When I was in the palace for the first time in 1932, accompanied by my father, everything there was just as it had been ‘at the moment its owners departed’ (as my father said). The bedroom of Nicholas and Alexandra with its oriel and hydrangeas, Alexandra’s favorite flower. Iron beds with wrought decorations at the head, just like we had in our house. Over the head of the bed there were a great many icons ranging from ordinary (household) size to the tiniest medallions and porcelain Easter eggs with depictions of the saints. Upstairs in the nursery was Alexei’s rocking horse….

  “My aunt used to tell us that one of her responsibilities was cleaning the children’s rooms and putting together their wardrobe, and when the little girls were growing up she taught them handwork. My aunt was inseparable from the girls even on the family’s trips to the Crimea.… When the war began, Elizaveta taught the girls to care for the sick. The girls worked in a hospital as nurses and aides, and all the maids and parlormaids worked with them. This collective of amateur medics was headed up by the tsaritsa….

  “According to Aunt Elizaveta’s stories, the children were modest and diligent. Olga, the eldest, was a little spoiled and capricious and could be lazy, but Tatiana and Anastasia were always busy—all of them sewed and embroidered, they even cleaned their own room. Their father paid the children more attention than their mother did. Alexandra Feodorovna often lay in bed with a migraine, or quarreled with the parlormaids, or was busy with antique buyers from the Alexander Market (the tsaritsa ordered old and unfashionable items sold to the antiquarians, although she changed mother of pearl buttons for ivory or glass before selling).… In about 1905 Elizaveta acquired a helper, another parlormaid, Anna Stepanovna [Stefanovna] Demidova. She became very friendly with Elizaveta and her family. She even became my father’s fiancée. At that time he was an official for the State Railway Inspection Control. He served under State Councilor Vladimir Skryabin, the brother of Vyacheslav Skryabin-Molotov, future prime minister under Stalin.

  “The parlormaids were permitted to invite guests to visit. The tsaritsa was very frugal with the housekeeping. If the girls had to offer their guests something, they did so at their own expense. Moreover, all were warned to save their money while they were working, since they would receive no pension. Parlormaids, maids, and lackeys had to be unmarried. In the event of marriage they were dismissed or moved to other jobs.

  “At our house we kept a cherished box with photographs of the Family with dedicatory inscriptions to my aunt. Simple inscriptions like ‘To Liza as a memento from a grateful father,’ ‘To Liza in gratitude for her loyalty’ (Alexandra). And children’s like ‘To dear Liza from Tania’ and the uneven letters of childish scribbles. ‘Liza, sew on my button,’ and so on. In 1932 my father brought this box out, it was opened, and my whole family looked through them all—and burned them, to my aunt’s sobs as well as mine. They were destroyed because of the general searches being made then of ‘formers.’ They were looking for gold, digging up cellars and attics. My father was extremely cautious and decided to be rid of the dangerous burden.”

  Yet another view from the “people.”

  “People”—that’s what Nicholas called his servants in his diaries.

  The girls were growing up, and Alix was giving increasing thought to their marriages.

  “Oh, if only our children could be as happy in their married life,” she wrote him.

  In 1912 everyone began to talk about a marriage between Olga and Nicholas’s cousin Dmitry, who had been taken in by the tsar many years earlier. She was in love. Dmitry was a charming rake, her father’s favorite. Even the evil-tongued Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich said that he was “as elegant as a Fabergé statuette.”

  In the happy year 1912, on August 26, on the centennial of the victory over Napoleon at Borodino, a cavalcade of grand dukes, with the tsar in the lead, rides a circuit around the famous field of Borodino. There is a fence ahead.

  “Hey, show us what you can do, Olympian!” (that summer Dmitry had participated in the Olympic Games in Stockholm), Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich says to Dmitry. “Show us how to jump?”

  Immediately Dmitry, playful, sails over the high fence. Later, in the forest, where the imperial train is waiting, Dmitry gallops right up the embankment to the train car. Alix is smiling out the window. So is Olga.

  Then all of a sudden the engagement is off. Behind the scenes of the break is that same smiling Alix. The mistress of the family does not want Dmitry.

  She is looking for another match for her daughter: the Romanian heir. But Olga is true to her feelings, as her father once was. She thinks up a patriotic justification: “I am Russian and wish to remain Russian.”

  But the engagement must take place, so the family sails to Constanta on the Standart.

  A ceremonial welcome on the wharf, in the evening an official dinner. Olga sits next to the prince and chats with him with her usual delicate graciousness. Meanwhile the remaining grand duchesses make a show of being deadly bored.

  Yes, the roles have been passed out—and the sisters are playing them well. The next morning no one is talking about a wedding anymore.

  Why did the empress not want the marriage to Dmitry? Did she dream of seeing her eldest daughter a queen? Or had a terrible premonition already settled in her nervous soul then, and had she decided to remove her eldest daughter from the country no matter what the cost?

  Chapter 6

  DIARY OF THE SUCCESSFUL MONARCH

  “IT SEEMS STRANGE TO THINK I HAVE TURNED 45”

  The idyllic prewar decade. The family and royal Europe were living their own special life. They visited one another, corresponded, and married. These people, who had the lengthiest of titles, were to each other Georgie and Nicky, Alix and Minnie—simply, sisters, aunts, brothers, uncles, fathers, and sons.

  All these years he kept in his diary a chronicle of the royal families’ social life.

  In 1908, the Swedish King Gustav paid a visit. (During the reception for the Swedish king, Nicholas pointedly did not introduce Count Witte to him—Alix’s idea.) A meeting with the French President Falière, another with the English King Edward VII.

  The royal family came—the new king and queen of Denmark. (After the death of Nicholas’s grandfather, the Danish king, Nicholas’s uncle took the throne.) At the ceremonial dinner the empress-mother did not pass up the opportunity to demonstrate her power, or, rather, what was left of her power. At her request, Count Witte was seated next to the high table where both royal families sat.

  Vanity Fair continued: in late July the Standart went to France, then England. This was his return visit to Edward VII.

  And again, the Crimea, the Livadia Palace. And from the Crimea, he went to see the king of Italy.

  (On the eve of this farewell, Alix was sitting with Anya in the blooming Livadia park when
Anya heard a familiar whistle. As always at that sound, Alix jumped up from the bench, blushing like a young girl, and said: “That’s him calling me.” And she rushed off, ran. It was all just as it had been in 1894.)

  But it was already 1909.

  On the return trip Nicholas circumvented Austria (thus expressing his protest to the Austrian emperor over Austria’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This gesture was widely noted by the newspapers of the world and in it the prelude to the future world war was already sounded.)

  Grand Duke Michael Nikolaevich, the father of Sergei, Sandro, and George, Nicholas’s closest childhood friends, died. The people of his youth were leaving him behind.

  The priest Ioann of Kronstadt died. His prophecies and his miracle working were famous to all Russia. He had not taken the vows of schema, he was not a monk, and he had not given up conjugal life, but the people considered him a saint. The only man who could have stood up to Rasputin was dead.

  Another year passed. The years were slipping by. The English King Edward VII, one of the principal founders of the Russo-Anglo-Franco alliance, passed away. Nine monarchs and innumerable princes converged for the funeral. They thought they were burying the English king, but they were actually burying peaceful monarchical Europe. Only a few years remained until the great upheavals of world war. George, the same George who so strikingly resembled Nicholas, became King George V.

  On the return trip Nicholas stopped at Uncle Willy’s residence in Potsdam. The arrow of the Russian political compass had to stand exactly halfway between England and Germany.

  In December 1910 Tolstoy died. On learning of Tolstoy’s death, Nicholas wrote that Tolstoy was a great artist and that God was his judge.

  In February 1911 they celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the freeing of the serfs. Only fifty years before, people in his country had lived as slaves. There were celebrations in Kiev and the unveiling of a monument to Alexander II.